Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/107

Rh METAPHYSIC 97 to the old logics, it also put a new meaning into these logics by bringing to light the principles that were involved in them. At the same time it broke down the division that had been supposed to exist between logic and meta- physic, between the form or method of thought and its matter. It showed that thought itself contains a matter from which it cannot be separated, and that it is only by reason of this matter that it is able to ask intelligent questions of nature, and to get from nature intelligible answers. A short space must be devoted to explain this relation of the three logics to each other. The analytic logic fairly represents our first scientific attitude to the world, in which we concentrate our attention upon the facts as they are given in experience, with no thought of any mental synthesis through which they are given. To ourselves we seem to have to do with an object which is altogether independent of our thought, and what we need in order to know it is to keep ourselves in a purely receptive attitude. All we can do is to analyse what is given, without adding anything of our own to it. It has, however, already been pointed out that this apparent self- abnegation is possible only because, in abnegating our indi vidual point of view, we do not abnegate the point of view that belongs to us as universal or thinking subjects. In other words, the objectivity of knowledge thus attained is not the ceasing of the activity of our thought, but rather of all that interferes with that activity. We seem to abstract from ourselves, but what we do abstract from is only the individuality that stands between us and the world. The scientific observer who has thus denied himself, however, is not necessarily conscious of the meaning of what he has done. The immediate expression of his consciousness is not &quot; I think the object,&quot; but &quot; it, the object, is &quot; ; and the more intensely active he is the more his activity is lost for him in the object of it. His whole work is, for himself, only the analysis of given facts, and for the rest he seems to have nothing to do but to take the world as he finds it. The voice of nature to which he listens is for him not his own voice but the voice of a stranger, and it does not occur to him to reflect that nature could not speak to any one but a conscious self. His business is to determine things as they present themselves, to enumerate their qualities, to measure their quantities ; and his logic accord ingly is a logic governed by the idea of the relative com prehension and extension of the things which he thus names and classifies. Such an analytic logic seems to be all that is necessary, because the only predicates by which things are as yet determined are those which are involved in their presence to us in perception, and as perceived they seem to be at once given in all their reality to the mind that apprehends them. A step is taken beyond this first naive consciousness of things, whenever a distinction is made between appearance and reality, or whenever it is seen that the things perceived are essentially related to each other, and that therefore they cannot be known by their immediate presence to sense, but only by a mind which relates that which is, to that which is not, immediately perceived. If &quot; the shows of things are least themselves,&quot; we must go beyond the shows in order to know them ; we must seek out the permanent for that which is given as transient, the law for the phenomenon, the cause for the effect. The process of thought in know ledge therefore is no longer lost in its immediate object, but is, partly at least, distinguished from it. For just in proportion as the reality is separated from the appearance does the knower become conscious of an activity of his own thought in determining things. From this point of view nature is no longer an object which spontaneously reveals itself to us, but rather one which hides its meaning from us, and out of which we must wring its secret by persistent questioning. And, as this questioning process obviously has not its direction determined purely by the object itself, it becomes manifest that the mind must bring with it the categories by which it seeks to make nature intelligible. To ask for the causes of things, or the laws of things, pre supposes that the immediate appearance of them does not correspond to an idea of reality which the mind brings with it, and by which it judges the appearance. Nature is supposed to be given to or perceived by us as a multi tude of objects in space passing through successive changes in time ; and what science seeks is to discover a necessity of connexion running through all this apparently contingent coexistence and succession and binding it into a system. Science, therefore, seems to question nature by means of an idea of the necessary interdependence and connexion of all things, as parts of one systematic whole governed by general laws an idea which it does not get from nature, but which it brings to nature. Hence the logic in which this process of investigation expresses its consciousness of itself will be a synthetic logic, a logic built on certain prin ciples which are conceived to be independent of experience, and by the aid of which we may so transform that experi ence, so penetrate into it or get beyond it, as to find for it a better explanation than that which it immediately gives of itself. The Posterior Analytic, in which Aristotle brings in the idea of cause to vivify the syllogistic process, or supply a real meaning to it, may already be regarded as a first essay in this direction. And the theory of inductive logic, as explained by Bacon and his successors down to Mill, is a continuous attempt to determine what are the principles and methods on which experience must be questioned, in order to extract from it a knowledge which is not given in im mediate perception. It was, however, Hume who first brought into a clear light the subjectivity of the principles postulated in this logic, and especially of the principle of causality, which is the most important of them. In thus contrasting the sub jectivity of the principles of science with the objectivity of the facts to which they are applied, it was his intention ! to cast doubt on the science which is based on the applica tion of the former to the latter. The principles, he main tains, are not legitimately derived from the facts, therefore they cannot legitimately be used to interpret them. They are due to the influence of habit, which by an illegitimate process raises frequency of occurrence into the universality and necessity of law, and so changes a mere subjective association of ideas into an assured belief and expectation of objective facts. The answer given by Kant to this sceptical criticism of science involved a rejection of that very opposition of subjective and objective upon which it was based. Without necessary and universal principles, the experience of things as qualitatively and quantitatively determined objects, coexisting in space and passing through changes in time (or even the determination of the successive states of the subject as successive), would itself have been impossible. Hence necessity of thought cannot be derived from a frequent experience of such objects. It is true that the determination of things as permanent sub stances reciprocally acting on each other, according to uni versal laws, goes beyond the determination of them as qualified and quantified phenomena in space and time. But both determinations are possible only through the same a priori principle, and we cannot admit the former determination without implicitly admitting the latter. As, therefore, it is through the necessity and universality of thought that objects exist for us, even before the application to them of the principles of scientific induction, and as the application of those principles is only a further step in ! that a priori synthesis which is already involved in the 1 perception of these objects, we have no reason for treating